How to sell stuff - advice from Clever CEO

02 Oct 2018

Notes and observations from watching a lecture by Tyler Bosmeny - Clever CEO.

• Sales is not what you see in movies (men in expensive suits etc).
• Sales is about talking to users.
• Being passionate and knowledgeable about the problem you are solving is extremely helpful while selling.
• Sales is about creating a funnel. Stages:
  • Prospecting - finding who might be interested in the product
  • Conversations - you reach to people and check whether they are actually interested, if the product is a good match
  • Closing - get the committment
  • Revenue :)

Prospecting

• figure out who will take the call
• “you will hear a lot of ‘nos’”
• innovators (people who might be willing to pay for your service) are just 2,5% of the population
• you need to talk to a lot of people
• best methods
  • reach out to your network
  • conferences
    • small gatherings of people who are potential users
    • figure out top conferences for your field
    • ask organizers for a list of people who are attending (GDPR????)
    • email them and explain what are you working on and that you would like to spend some time to have a chat (30mins?) and show them what you have and maybe they would be interested in this.
    • go to the conference, hopefully with 30min slots booked from morning till late evening
    • talk and sell :)
  • cold emails (GDPR????)
    • very effective if done well
    • short, to the point, personalized, tells why people should care
    • goal - get to stage 2 - a conversation

Conversations

Sales is about listening.

• Shut up and listen.
• Best sales people in the world listen a lot and ask questions
  • “Why did you even agree to have a call with me?”
  • “What is the problem you hoped to solve?”
  • “What would be the ideal solution if you could have anything?”

Closing

• don’t fuss on the contract details
• YC has a free contract template
• for the first/two customers do whatever it takes, but in general do not do 1-off “please add this one feature” implementations
  • say instead: “sorry, but we can’t accomodate individual user requests, if we get feedback from more users this is missing, we will add this”
• instead of 60-day free trial, do 1-year contract with 30-day cancellation
  • this is meeting customer in the middle: you let them cancel if they don’t like it, but by default they are your customers

Links:

• YouTube video